The Cycle of Street Trash
by Lizard Pie
Summary: Everyone ignores the fact that Rinku came from the streets, if they don't ignore him all together. A journal piece set the night of the first round. Strong language and themes. Please R


AN: Just a little piece about Rinku's backround that has been floating around my head for a while. Everyone seems to ignore the fact that he's a street kid, that he's beyond just a humor thing. Maybe I'm thinking too much into him. Probubly.

I try to avoid talking about my past. Not that it's fuzzy or anything. Absolutely nothing like that. It's just that after a while, the more people know about you and where you've come from -if it's bad enough- they stop looking at you as a person and start seeing something or something to be pitied. You become nothing but your past -the pity robs you of a future, for good or for bad.

I've learned to just steer clear of anything like that and just be the present. Stuck without anything but the here and now, it's hard to get burned.

Still, living like this hurts like hell after long enough. Cliché as it sounds, it builds up. It does that for everybody, I guess. That's why everyone and their cousin will tell you ways to get rid of it.

Talk therapy.

Journaling.

Confessionals.

Long walks.

Poetry.

Lots of people where I come from drown it out with externals. Stimulants, hallucinogens, depressants, sex; anything that takes them out of their life for a little while. People burn themselves out just trying to run away from themselves.

I won't -I can't- do that. I'll pick up a journal. To loose your awareness can be death where I come from. Mothers first teach their children defensive shields. Almost before the babies can walk, they can make a weak force field in their sleep.

I've spent too much time surviving to forget everything I've learned.

I like to imagine my mother was pretty. And smart, like a doctor or something. That she loved me, meant the best. Tried, at least as long as she could. I guess every orphan likes to fantasize like that. It makes you wish you were one of those animals -sharks, for example- that are born and then have nothing to do with their parents. So it's not unusual. So you don't have to hear the stories you pray aren't true.

I mean, fuck. A young mother wouldn't just leave her baby, still fucking covered in placenta, naked on a doorstep in the middle of the night -then walk away. My hearings good enough, if it happened, she could hear me from two miles or so off.

It can't be true that she wouldn't look back when her baby could die of hypothermia in an hour if no one else is around and takes sympathy.

Welcome to the world, best of luck that the first one to come across you isn't desperate for a meal.

It can't be true. Why would you take a baby all the way though the birthing cycle to leave it to it's death?

Sometimes I wonder if not knowing would hurt more.

I was fucking lucky I found someone who took me in. I've heard tons of stories of abandoned children being eaten or raised as sex slaves. I've heard of tons of children who have been sold by their own parents when money is too tight.

They're turned into currency and food, most of the time before they can understand the words, sometimes even the concepts.

These are the stories that stay hidden in the slums. I hear this kind of shit goes on in all three worlds. Knowing your not alone doesn't help the situation, but it sure makes you feel a hell of a lot better about it.

After all, I wonder how many people understand the concept of changing one person in their lives and being dead, or worse.

I assume it was Zeru-sama who found me. He's the only one I can really see deciding he'd take me and figure out how to make it work later. The only one I can really see keeping me after the financial problems, the fights, the emotional and physical drain I don't even doubt I caused.

None the less, I owe them all. After everything I did, they didn't kill me to make it go away. It sounds sick that the greatest reason you have for owing someone is that they didn't kill you in your sleep before they got to know you. Eventually, my reason for gratitude grew, but it always came back to that.

And then I get to see them die, one by one. I never even got to pay them back, like I ever fucking could. The people who fucking saved me millions of times over are torn apart in front of my eyes and I couldn't do a thing about it.

I get to see my final surviving protector come to death's doorstep. And then just before we're torn apart by an enraged mob, I'm saved again.

My life is just one person saving me from something only to turn around and need to be saved again. The time I was raped, the thousands of times people went hungry so I could eat. The thousands of times they nearly died to that I could go on and need to be saved again.

I'm a parasite, jumping from one host to the other because I can't fucking make it otherwise. My mind's trapped in a body which matures at an almost static pace -I can't get out from the live of a leech because I can't.

The most I got to do is to five my teammates as proper of a burial as I could in the woods behind the hotel.

I write this and I can't fucking read a word because I keep crying on it. I'll be surprised if in a week I can even tell what this was supposed to be.

But by then, I'll have needed to be saved again. The cycle will keep going and I can't do a damn thing to stop it. Knowing about it doesn't help the situation, but it sure makes you feel a hell of a lot better about it.

I don't know how this journal was supposed to be helpful -to be anything more than digging a knife into old wounds and twisting them open. The metaphorical blood is all over the place.

So I'll be spending the night, healing the remains of my bastardization of a family.

And maybe Chu'll die. Urameshi did give him one hell of a beating. Maybe I'll be dragging him down to the woods. Another grave marked with some stone. Next to the other four.

And maybe this is a sign to get my ass out from the debt of others. Fuck my physical maturity and make it on my own. Hop on the first boat out of hear and rip the world a new one.

I shouldn't be thinking of this right now. I have to keep trying to keep Chu alive. He's probably bleed though his bandages by now.

And -if I save him or don't- maybe I can finally break the cycle. Maybe.

But then, I still owe someone for that, won't I?


End file.
